CHRISTIANITY. The inum•diate effect of Chris tianity was to strengthen in general the preva lent Aristotelian system of economic philosophy, its condemnation of usury and the pursuit of wealth in trade, its assertion of the superiority of agriculture, and its support of the social sys tem of status. Christianity thus strengthened the subjection of economies to ethics, but it weakened the subjection, of economies to polities. Within the Church there was taught the equality of men before Cod, and the essential dignity of labor. The clergy were permitted to earn their own livelihood by manual labor, and the laity were exhorted to free their slaves as soon they became Christians.
TuE Apunost; AGES (A.D. 400-1500). Inasmuch as the teachings and doctrines of the early me dia-vat writers are well summed up in the Corpus Juris Canonici (see CANON LAW), it will be convenient to discuss them under the general heading of the Canonists—the schoolmen and theologians who after the vomitilat ion of eeche siastieol laws by (Indian in the twelfth century analyzed and expounded, among other things, the relation to economic affairs of the Scrip tures, the writings of the Christian Fathers, de cisions of Church councils, and Papal decrees. The doctrines of the canonists were largely de rived front the Scriptural injunctions against the excessive pursnit of wealth and the payment or acceptanee of interest on loans. The early Fathers in their condemnation of avariee and their exaltation of fraternat.love, sometimes used ex pressions which taken by themselves imply an utter condemnation of private property and an advocacy of communism among the faithful, but this was only an ideal, and private property was early recognized as a necessity resulting from the fall of man. The effect of this ideal, however, appears in the accepted doctrine that the maintenance of the poor was not a matter of philanthropy, but an obligation. The Scriptural attitude toward wealth led to an state ment of the moral superiority of agriculture and handiwork over trade and emmneree as a means of earning a livelihood, and the early writers seemed almost unanimous in the belief that what the seller made by trade the buyer necessarily lost.
With the increasing temporal power of the Chureh and the great development of commerce which marked the eleventh century, came the necessity of harmonizing the doctrines of the Church with the obvious requirements of com merce, and many concessions were made by the later canoeists. Thomas Aquinas (c.I226-74), the most authoritative of the later medheval canon ists, concedes that it is lawful to trade for a simple livelihood, or in order to supply a coun try with necessary articles which it does not produce within its own borders, or when the profits of the trade are devoted to some honorable purpose such as the ztssistanec of the poor, but that, save in exceptional circumstances, a seller is bouml to reveal a fault in an article, and that it is not permissible to sell an article for more than its worth. The fundamental :uiom, in ac cordance with which all these conclusions are reached, is that every commodity has a fixed and objective value, which can he readily ascertained, and which determines its just price. To ask more for an article than its just price was ex tortion, and to pay less was equally unjustifiable. The distinctively ethical viewpoint of the canoe ists is shown in the prohibition of usury (q.v.). This was based upon the Scriptural injunctions against usury, and upon the Aristotelian argu ment that, money being barren it would he extortion to (large for its use. Another favor ite auguinent was that interest was pay for time, hut time is barren, and hence to demand interest was to demand something for noth ing. It is needless to add that, as the grow ing commerce of the :Middle Ages made the need of borrowing capital more and more imperative, the canonical theory was stretched so as to ac commodate many ingenious forms of contract for what was practically, though not nominally, usury. in the latter half of the fifteenth century the Franciscans themselves instituted the motifs de pia(' (q.v.), or charitable banks for loaning money to the poor, aml a small interest rate was imposed in order to defray the expenses of man agement. By the middle of the sixteenth century the Church had practically abandoned its effort forcibly to suppress avarice and the pursuit of wealth.